RLTV
by Taidhe
Summary: A sad excuse for a political statement. Wrote it at the height of Survivor fever- and I *should* technically make it an original, I suppose...


"Duo, do you understand our American History homework?" Quatre appeared at the threshold of Duo and Heero's room. "I just don't get it. I don't think Wufei does either, and Heero and Trowa don't have that class." he said, Wufei hovering just behind him.  
  
"The homework? An essay on the leaps forward in psychological observation during early 2100 AD, right? Yeah, I already did it. What don't you understand?" Duo said easily. He'd done that homework first- it was uncomplicated from his perspective.  
  
"Everything!" Quatre said with a grimace. He and Wufei entered the room and plopped down on the bed, or sat on the floor, respectively.  
  
"I don't see what advancement in psychological observation they made at all." Wufei stated. Both of them looked somewhat perplexed. Duo took this in and sighed.  
  
"Make yourselves comfortable, this may take a while." he said. Wufei stretched out on the floor, Quatre leaned back against the wall, and both looked at him expectantly. Duo swiveled his chair around and took a breath.  
  
"Ok, psychological observation as we know it is perfectly acceptable today. We see no problem with placing "ordinary" people in strange situations and studying the effects, even if it turns out to be detrimental to their mental health, because it is in the name of science, right?"  
  
"Yeah, what's the problem with that? We couldn't learn anything about the mind without reducing people to primal urges." Quatre said.  
  
"Well, between 1980-2010, America, the richest country, had just advanced enough to be able to hold such studies. The government wanted to do so, of course, since it would increase the effectiveness of propaganda and training nearly a hundred percent. The only problem was that it wasn't socially acceptable in the slightest. People would never had stood for, say, one of our most famous experiments, taking several orphans and placing them in an environment of nothing but stairs."  
  
"Yeah, I've heard about that one. Pure genius." Quatre nodded.  
  
"I've never heard about it. What was its' purpose?" Wufei asked.  
  
"Well, they had a little machine that produced the only source of food under the right actions. The right actions were to be as mean, cruel, and backstabbing as possible to their fellow experiments. They weren't told of this, of course, they had to find out for themselves, but the point was to see if this could train people for undesirable jobs, torturers, executioners, and spies, etc. It was over 70% effective, except for two children who chose to starve rather than continually betray one another. Anyway, that kind of thing wasn't acceptable at all. Yeah, I know, weird taboos, eh?  
  
"So what the government and a couple of psychologists did was design something that WAS totally acceptable. They called it Reality TV, or RLTV. The first one was interesting. They took oh, about 20 people or so, and placed them on a remote island, and separated them into different "tribes". The two tribes would compete for food and supplies, or separately for an "immunity tablet". Every week or so, they would convene and vote one member off the island. With an immunity tablet, you couldn't be voted for. The last person to survive was given a million dollars. Now, to make this new idea of reducing people to base levels tolerable, they put a huge amount of cameras on the island and broadcast it as a new kind of show. I think its' name was "Survivor". It was a huge hit, and soon a lot more RLTV shows came into being, some that were harmless and others that were studied by psychologists. A harmless one would be "Big Brother". It didn't generate a lot of drama or action, and consequently was taken off the air. Its' replacer was hugely successful, called "Boot Camp" and allowed them to do in-depth studies of people who would normally never join the military. An even more effective show was "Moolah Beach". It was the same, basically, as Survivor, but instead used children and teenagers, allowing scientists to study the unbiased, impressionable mind.  
  
"So the essay is on how the government tricked the public into accepting something that otherwise would have caused mass outrage, because by 2015, they were conducting the "House of Stairs" experiment in private, and nobody minded." Duo finished.  
  
"I get it now." Quatre said.  
  
"Hmm. Weak of the government. They should have been able to do anything they wanted without the populaces' yea or nay. Weak of the people, to be fooled by such subterfuge." Wufei commented.  
  
"You should read up on America's PC* government more, Wu. It might make more sense that way." Duo said as both boys got up to leave. Quatre slowly closed the door behind him, and Duo swung back to the computer to finish his essay.  
  
"Fools." The braided boy snorted softly. "They pretend to be outraged at Heero's upbringing, at the circumstances that made them terrorists, without understanding that RLTV is exactly the kind of thing that made those circumstances acceptable. In another generation, everything will be acceptable. If it isn't already." Duo finished typing and hit print.  
  
  
  
*America's PC government: Pre-Colony, NOT Politically Correct. ^_~ 


End file.
